Despite Its Misogyny `Cuckoo`s` Still Works

May 22, 1986|By Richard Christiansen, Entertainment editor.

Dale Wasserman`s stage adaptation of Ken Kesey`s ``One Flew Over the Cuckoo`s Nest`` has not aged very well as drama, but as pot-boiling romantic melodrama, it can still score effectively. Case in point: the play`s new production at Stage Left.

Most familiar now through its Academy Award-winning film version, with Jack Nicholson cast as Randle P. McMurphy, the rip-roaring rebel of a mental hospital, the play today seems most notable for its anti-female sentiments.

Most of the women in the story, on stage or off, are portrayed as harpies who bleed or chop the life out of their men. That extends from Nurse Ratched, the sadistic woman who makes the mental ward`s men toe the line, to the castrating mothers of two of the show`s main characters, the innocent virgin Billy Bibbit and the mute hulk Chief Bromden, and the bitch wife of a third, the effeminate Dale Harding.

The only women seen with any sympathy are the two happy hookers whom superstud McMurphy brings in to the ward to service his buddies.

The notion that the insane are the only sane members of society also is a naive theme that runs throughout the play in the battle of the inmates versus the institution.

Within this context, however, ``Cuckoo`s Nest`` still works on its audience with surefire tricks. For example, when McMurphy`s drive to obtain TV privileges for the men seems almost lost for want of a vote from the immobile Bromden, and when, at the last minute, Bromden slowly raises his hand to signal victory, the audience still breaks into applause at the triumph of the good guys.

Stage Left`s resurrection of the play, unfocused and amateurishly enacted though it is in spots, has a couple of performances that are good and might have been better if they had received more precise direction.

Thomas Groenwald throws macho force into his McMurphy, Jan Lucas keeps her face puckered into a tight, lemon-sucking squint as Nurse Ratched, Chuck Goad makes a decent stab at the intellectual, ineffectual Harding, Rodrick Selby rumbles impressively as Bromden and Terry Green, despite some overplaying of the stammering and twitching, is a sympathetic Bibbit.

The physical production squeezed into the narrow performance space of Stage Left`s storefront theater is quite good.

``ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO`S NEST``

A play by Dale Wasserman based on the novel by Ken Kesey. Directed by Ann Fournier, with lighting by Randy Burgess, costumes by Robert L. Cornelius and sound by Robert Ryan. Opened April 16 at Stage Left, 3244 N. Clark St., and plays at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 6 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday, through May 25. Length of performance, 2:05. Tickets are $10 and $12. Phone 883-8830.